Site Mobile Navigation

Suicide Bomber Attacks U.N. Building in Nigeria

ABUJA, Nigeria — A suicide bomber detonated a vehicle packed with explosives outside the United Nations headquarters in the Nigerian capital of Abuja on Friday, destroying several floors in a thunderous blast that left at least 18 people dead, witnesses and officials said.

Boko Haram, a shadowy Nigerian Islamist insurgency group with possible links to Al Qaeda’s affiliates in the region, claimed responsibility for the attack in a telephone call to the BBC’s Hausa language broadcast service in northern Nigeria. If confirmed, it would signal a significant leap in the scope of Boko Haram’s focus, which until now had taken aim exclusively at domestic targets as part of an ill-defined aim to establish strict Islamic law in the country’s north.

The Nigerian government has come under repeated attack by Boko Haram in the north and by militants in the south. Foreign oil companies and their workers have also been a common target of southern insurgents, who demand a greater share in the nation’s oil profits. But the deadly strike on the United Nations, the first on its offices in Nigeria, was a surprising turn. Fifteen of the dead were United Nations personnel, an agency spokesman said Friday night from New York.

“This act provides a new dimension to threats on the domestic front,” said Joy Ogwu, Nigeria’s ambassador to the United Nations, who called the attack a “transnational crime” and urged renewed efforts to fight terrorism in her country.

Photo

Rescue workers in Abuja moved out victims of a suicide car bombing at the United Nations headquarters in Nigeria. The bomb destroyed three of the building's seven floors, a witness said Friday. At least 18 people are dead.Credit
Tony Nwosu/European Pressphoto Agency

If indeed the work of Boko Haram, the attack lends substance to new concerns of officials and analysts that an inward-looking organization is increasingly adopting the methods and aims of global terrorists. The bombing, capping months of small-scale explosions and assassinations, mostly in the country’s north, is by far the most brazen attack yet.

“The logic of Boko Haram has been essentially inward looking,” said Chidi Anselm Odinkalu of the Open Society Justice Initiative, in Abuja. “To now seek to attack the U.N. entirely departs from the narrative they have so far constructed. That’s the most worrying thing about this. It makes Boko Haram an international threat.”

In recent years, United Nations offices have been the targets of lethal attacks in Iraq, Algeria and Afghanistan, and though the bombing was unprecedented for Nigeria, it did not come as a total surprise. United Nations officials said that the organization had stepped up security at all its buildings in Nigeria in the past month after receiving information that it could be a target of Boko Haram. The officials said they were now evaluating new threats and would be further strengthening security at United Nations facilities in Nigeria.

Twenty-six United Nations agencies, including the United Nations Development Program, Unicef and the United Nations Population Fund, maintained offices in the building, which is close to the United States Embassy and the Nigerian national defense headquarters. As many as 400 people may have been inside at the time of the attack, and the death toll was likely to rise, officials said.

Farhan Haq, a United Nations deputy spokesman, said the suicide bomber’s car rammed through two gates surrounding the building around 11 a.m. local time. Witnesses said a huge explosion sent billows of smoke over the area and spread panic.

Photo

A victim of a blast that ripped through the United Nations offices on Friday in Abuja was carried into an ambulance.Credit
Afolabi Sodtunde/Reuters

Adebayo Jelil, a security guard at the building, said that he saw a big jeeplike vehicle drive through the exit gate of the building, head for the reception area and explode. He said at least three floors of the seven-story structure were heavily damaged, with walls blasted away and cables and rods protruding.

“The U.N. headquarters in Nigeria has been shattered,” said a Nigerian Red Cross official who was at the scene, Adeyemo Andronicus Adebayo. “You see littered bodies, blood,” he said, adding, “It was the worst devastation.”

By midday, casualties were being ferried to the national hospital nearby, and the area had been cordoned off by security. The hospital put out an appeal for blood on local radio, while rescue workers clambered up ladders into an enormous hole in the mangled building.

The United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, denounced the bombing, as did the Nigerian government, which called it an “an assault on global peace and security.” Ken Saro-Wiwa Jr., an aide to President Goodluck Jonathan, said Boko Haram was now “the priority item,” while President Obama said the “attack on Nigerian and international public servants demonstrates the bankruptcy of the ideology that led to this heinous action.”

The precise nature of that ideology is in some doubt. Boko Haram rarely states its aims beyond calling for a stricter imposition of the already existing, loosely-applied Shariah law in Nigeria’s northern states, and suggesting a rollback in democratic institutions.

Photo

The death toll is expected to rise.Credit
The New York Times

But the attack is in keeping with a marked increase in the group’s sophistication. Analysts point to its growing use of improvised explosive devices and overseas trips by its members, possibly for training, as evidence that Boko Haram is getting international help, possibly from Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.

“What’s really alarming is the level of planning and organization that has gone into it,” said Dr. Jibrin Ibrahim, director of the Center for Democracy and Development, an Abuja research organization.

“The whole issue about Boko Haram is that we know very little about them,” Dr. Ibrahim added, suggesting that Nigerian security services, with their harsh suppression of the organization two years ago in a bloody assault on its headquarters in the northern city of Maiduguri, had wiped out many sources of information.

Henry Wilkinson, the head analyst at the London office of Janussian Risk Advisory, a consulting group, said that if Boko Haram was in fact responsible, then the scale and method of the attack suggested that it had adopted the tactics of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, the group that took responsibility for a similar attack on United Nations offices in Algeria four years ago.

“It pretty much confirms that Boko Haram has moved into the Al Qaeda orbit,” he said. “This all points to a clear trend that Boko Haram is evolving and expanding its targets.”

Senan Murray reported from Abuja, and Adam Nossiter from Dakar, Senegal. Rick Gladstone contributed reporting from New York, Dan Bilefsky from the United Nations, and Nick Cumming-Bruce from Geneva.

A version of this article appears in print on August 27, 2011, on page A4 of the New York edition with the headline: Nigeria Shaken by Suicide Attack on United Nations Building. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe